Robert Pincus, "Images in Guerrero universe convey Mexican life," The San Diego Union Tribune, May 1985.

The universe that Raul Guerrero envisions in his most recent paintings is exotic and hypnotic. In one, a fourth century Mayan mask, surrounded by brightly colored butterflies, floats in mid-space by a tranquil lake while a frog noncommittally observes this defiance of gravity. In another, three small Zapotec figurative sculpture return the viewer's stare.

These scenes, Guerrero explained in a recent interview at his downtown San Diego studio, are based on his memories of six months in Oaxaca, Mexico.

"I want them to convey a number of aspects of Mexican life: images of its politics, its religion, its culture, its passions, and its rituals."

An exhibition of these paintings - which comprise, as he puts it, a "poetic vision" of his tenure in Oaxaca - opens Saturday at the Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery (9000 Melrose Ave.) In Los Angeles and continues to June 16.

They are strikingly different work from the installations which introduced viewers to his art in the early '70's. In his new paintings, as he explains, " I feel my way toward the image." Contrastingly, much of his earliest art is rooted in analysis and concept.

In Guerrero's first solo exhibition, mounted at Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974, the most visually prominent piece was an upside down pyramidal frame, suspended from the ceiling and covered with coral-tinted nylon sheets.

Formerly simple, works such as this marked the beginning of Guerrero's attempt to confront the origins of art-making. " My thinking, based on some of Carl Jung's ideas, centered on visual archetypes. We don't know if the ability to visualize recurrent forms is biologically inherited or socially inherited. We see them in the sun, moon and the stars. The source of the pyramid for example, can be found in the Golden Triangle."

In much of his work of the 70's, Guerrero confronted that biological inheritance. His 1979 exhibition at the Libra Gallery of the Claremont Graduate School, encapsulated his investigation into the origins of visual thinking and art. With one work, which employed a Yaqui Devil Mask, he strived to remind viewers of the original sacred context of Native Mexican art. Because the mask was intended for use in performed rituals rather than for display, he made the mask revolve.

In addition, he created archaic instruments and music for the exhibition. Using a textbook illustration of bird bone whistles made by California natives as his guide, he carved his own versions from bones found on the Baja Peninsula. He hooked them up to an air compression system so they would play continuously in the gallery.

Ideas, not medium, defined Guerrero's art of that decade. In this way, his work was like much of the strong art of the late 60's and 70's. And like many other artists, he worked with photography, video, language and common objects, rather than painting and drawing, In his attempts to find new approaches for making art.

The late 70's and early 80's were years of transition for the 39-year-old Guerrero. He characterizes them as a traumatic period. "If I hadn't been an artist, I don't know what would have happened. As an artist, I could extract images from my depression, I could create a catharsis."

That depression is reflected in some of his art of those years. In one mixed media wall work, toy cars travel along a city street, viewed from a rooftop perspective. But the depicted moment is ominous instead of merely scenic, since Guerrero positioned a razor blade, on the surface of the work, to look as if it will descend on the busy avenue below.

During the late 60's and 70's, Guerrero had lived much of his time in Los Angeles. but in 1980, sensing the need for a change of locale, Guerrero, a native of San Diego, returned. " At that time, I needed to get away from the mania of the art world in L. A.," he explained.

He has found San Diego beneficial for his creative process, even if these have been economically tough years. ( To support himself, he has worked as a census taker, a boat builder and a lithograph printer at Green Tiger Press).

"For me, San Diego has been very good. It's a small city with a somewhat uncorrupted context for creating art. Making art is a reflective process and here I don't feel as if people are looking over my shoulder as I work. But we lack an ongoing critical dialogue, which every artist needs at some point of his career."

"There isn't a large support system either. There are not many outlets for employment, since there are not that many university positions. Most of the artists I know have to work at odd jobs. If there was a better support system this would, in my view, be even a more conducive city to work in."

Guerrero's years here have also been marked by a shift in his art. "My art started to move out into the world," he says. "Having worked with primary elements of visual form, I began to locate parallel elements in the world. Things that could be stimulating in the same ways as a triangle."

He began to draw prolifically, creating individual compositions and loosely narrative sequences. Using delicate lines set against single color backgrounds, he has offered impressions of various cities. He views New York from the perspective of a Indigent lying in the street, rendering trash cans and the side of a building from a sidewalk level perspective. A Los Angeles street is seen from the inside of a Inglewood donut shop. ( Some of these drawings were exhibited locally at Quint and Patty Aande galleries.)

The sequence of large drawings, "Red, White and Blue: an American Story" (1982), pictures a sailor and young woman, looking blissfully romantic in front of the local Santa Fe station in the first frame; but by the third, it looks as if he has died and gone to heaven.

As Guerrero sees it, the paintings continue - and expand upon - what he has done in his drawings. " All of these earlier images have led up to this new work. I'm moving toward allegory in these paintings, although the exact meaning of some of the is still mysterious to me."

To know their exact meaning is perhaps beside the point. The mood these paintings strike is compelling and unsettling. For instance, In "Mystery, " we view an old Mexican plaza, painted in soft lavenders, through ajar wooden gates. The entire scene has the look of a vividly recollected dream.

Many of the other paintings have a similarly effective aura. "I think of these as illustrations of ideas, of a landscape of the subconscious," he explains.

To picture that interior terrain is a difficult task, but Guerrero thinks it is a reasonable ambition. "All along I have been learning about subject matter, about what is relevant to me - and hopefully, to others. I would hope that my subjects can be universal to a degree."

Krisinte McKenna, "Guerrero: Beguiling, Baffling," Los Angeles Times, October 1986.

The idea dictates the medium for San Diego artist Raul Guerrero. As in work by Jonathan Borofsky, each of Guerrero's pieces is an independent satellite in its own weird orbit.

This free-wheeling approach makes for highly entertaining, if visually inconsistent, exhibitions where the viewer is sure to discover at least one piece that appeals to him because nothing resembles anything else.

A mini-retrospective of Guerrero, at USC Atelier in the Santa Monica Place mall (through Oct.19), features work dating back to 1974, most of which is fairly baffling. Among the stuff on view: five silkscreen prints, each given the name of a different city; photographs" charts of Egyptian hieroglyphics spattered with black paint in the shape of a vortex; mixed-media sculptural assemblage; folk art painting, and a glass diorama encasing a large ceramic owl on a bed of brown sand littered with broken bottles.

Usually described as a conceptual artist, Guerrero explains his work as being "based on some of Carl Jung's ideas, and attempting to present a key to the viewer's unconscious." Apparently Guerrero figures there's some swinging stuff going on in the collective unconscious because his work is brash, sexy and not above striking a cheap, glamorous pose.

His art is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of modern culture presented in a manner of precious archeological relics. These mystifying packets of information often take on the quality of evidence discovered at the scene of a crime, or private mementos show significance is lost on everyone but the melancholy soul who cherishes them.

Cliched ideas of romantic love are a recurring theme in Guerrero's work, as are art cliches-check his corny seascape or his sappy painting of chickens.

Exiting the gallery, one passes a straight black-and-white documentary-style photograph of two men at a table titled "The Gamble" and a pair of camera obscura prints of high school bands on parade.

Obviously, this show is so wide open to interpretation that you shouldn't have any trouble at all finding the key to your subconscious here.

Robert Pincus, "Guerrero's works may look familiar," The San Diego Union Tribune, November 1986.

The scenes in Raul Guerrero's recent pictures create a strong sense of deja vu. He mingles popular pictorial borrowings, discarded objects and his own imager to make familiar things look strange and strange occurrences look utterly familiar.

A current exhibition at Palomar College's Boehm Gallery surveys his work of the past three years. And there is ample evidence here - 23 works - to persuade us that this San Diego-based artist is worth close attention.

His two major series of 1984-86 are the subject of this show, "The Mexican Paintings" (1984-85) have a dreamlike quality, though the iconography isn't the stuff of personal dreams so much as cultural archetypes. Some of the newer "Paintings Constructions" (1985-86) employ familiar kitsch and visual sources, but he lends them an aura of psychological mystery.

"The Mexican Paintings," begun during a sojourn to Oaxaca, Mexico, and completed here, have a mystical or occult undercurrent. In "The Pool of Palenque," a frog sits by its edge, gazing at a Mayan mask, floating above the water and surrounded by butterflies. A jaguar is climbing a rocky slope in "Vista de Bonampak." within a landscape that peels away at the top of the painting; it reveals a wall of battling Mayans, done in the style of Mayan pictographic art.

Through these paintings are rendered in a semi realistic style, it's not the seen world that fills them but one that evokes the symbolic past of the region. Masks, female nudes and ritualistic looking effigies inhabit their scenes.

Yet even as he creates these mystical scenarios, Guerrero undercuts them with ironic touches. The appearance of the Mayan mask is being observed not by man, but by a seemingly uncomprehending frog in "The Pool of Palenque"; the jaguar approaches the Mayan pictographs in "Vista de Bonampak" with equal disinterest. Man has been excluded from these scenes, as if he is not privy to these locales of mystery and spiritual resonance's.

Since his emergence in the early '70s, Guerrero has questioned the ability of art to recapture it primal ritualistic power. His recent work articulates this concern with great lucidity. The push and pull between the yearning for spiritual meaning and its un-attainability is eloquently embodied by "The Mexican Paintings" and carries over into the recent paintings/constructions, too.

But the most recent works differ in their emphasis. Instead of taking solace in older forms of sacred art, they try to come to terms with contemporary culture and its lack of collective spiritual symbols.

"Primitive art" is a central work among this newer group. It has a concave relief surface which gradually recedes toward a centered rectangle - filled by the book cover of an early-20th century text on primitive art. Pull back its hinged cover, covered with a ferocious-looking mask, and inside is a small painting of a black woman's face, seemingly Jamaican or Haitian. Her smile seemingly mocks us, as if to say the true meanings and collective bond of aboriginal art will always remain hidden from Western man.

What we have substituted is kitsch objects and a vast pool of cinematic and advertising imagery, Guerrero's art implicitly asserts. In his "Paintings/Constructions," he challenges himself to breathe life into our visual cliches, and more often than not succeeds.

"Durango" pictures a horseshoe and a road sign on a road winding through steep cliffs. Even the frame is a cliche - fake-looking fence post-style poles from which he has hung a painted signboard of a cow's skull and a painted version of a wanted poster.

This picture looks like a still frame from nearly any and every western. But out of context, it is haunting - an apocalyptic landscape or sorts.

On the large painting, "Shadows," he attaches an example of that forgotten suburban artifact: the cuckoo clock. It sits on one side of a large canvas, as if the painted surface is a wall.

The clock becomes a point of departure for a curious pictorial scenario, in which the wall becomes a floor. Little toy birds, glued to its surface, seem as if they are walking all over it. The canvas is painted to look like a wood floor, with a mysterious light source creating shadows along it surface of a stairway.

Pictures such as these never let us forget that the scenes in Guerrero's paintings are completely fabricated; there is no illusion of realism in the "Paintings/Constructions," though some of the painted passages are illusionistically done. His art doesn't mirror our world but uses its discarded images and objects, manipulating them in intriguing ways. That Guerrero can also create vital art out of these things is something of a mystical act itself.

Michael McManus, "Emotion Minus Expressionism," ARTWEEK, December 1986.

Paris, kitsch, Jung, romanticism, cliches, borders, Oaxaca, framing, irony, surrealism, fetishism, primitivism - Raul Guerrero has much to answer for these days! The seductions and sacrileges of southern California's paradigmatic anti -stylist have compounded and become complex to an alarming degree. It's been nine years now, and by the end of the next summer at the very latest, someone should really bring Mr. Guerrero in for a session with the dialectical bright lights and the interrogative truncheons (just to check our perceptions). Something along the lines of the dialog that David Trowbridge extracted from him for the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) Journal in the autumn of 1977 would be nice. By various accounts, Guerrero is a dance photographer, an elitist, late of the school of Paris and a disciple of the dadaist Many Ray; he's political, a Chicano activist excavating the Olmec roots of his consciousness; he's the Prince of Oaxaca, a peripheral figure in the L. A. pop scene; he's a conceptual artist, a California surrealist; protégé of Emerson Woelffer; he's an oil painter in the Academy San Carlos tradition, devoted to the memory of Dr. Atl and Diego Rivera; he's an ironist, a constructivist, a Jungian, a comedian.

The trickster, the shape shifter (whatever we may choose to call him) is following up his October mini-retrospective at the University of Southern California Atelier with a large exhibition at Palomar College that details two recent series: Painting/Constructions and The Mexican Paintings. I regret (a little) my assurances to the artist that I would refrain from drawing too many rough extrapolations from his 1977 dialog with Trowbrodge, because the temptation is great. For example, a remark that Guerrero made in passing about the soothing balance of a Rousseau painting illuminates the approach used in an oil painting such as El Pico (1985). In El Pico, a large lobular prickly-pear cactus stands stolidly against a hot, dry, turbulent yellow-orange sky. A brown middle tone establishes the ground plane, and a lone mountain pushes the rectangle of the frame in an odd way. Beneath the cactus, a hen and a rooster mill around a tightly woven nest containing two eggs. It's an old-fashioned kind of painting. It even looks old, through this is more a matter of tonality, since the surface hasn't been distressed in any obvious manner. The paint handling is what sets it back there. As in Henri Rousseau's work, the treatment of textures and the blending are methodical and patient to the point of obsession. The lesson of the melding of brushwork that "the Douanier" carried away from Jean Leon Gérôme's studio is reappraised in The Mexican Paintings. An attention to particulars similar to Rousseau's earnest, naive and strikingly naturalistic-captures the details of both dream and waking day. The connection to a "primitive" painter such as Rousseau may cast some light on Guerrero's Mexican series.

In recent years, a certain amount of criticism has been leveled against Guerrero for the "cool" delivery of his tropical message. But does the implied demand for a steamy service of Central American motifs veil sublimated racism? Are confections of impostor and obtuse markings of the brush's attack required for emotive expression? If so, how atypical the body of art-historical commentary on Rousseau must be, with its talk of passion and delight. Guerrero's effort over the past decade to provoke and evoke specific emotional responses (he referred to this in the late seventies as keying into the viewer's unconscious) is the work's most intriguing aspect, and his eschewal of the new expressionist painterly vernacular is proving over time to be more an asset than an idiosyncrasy. As for the issue of race and nationality, recent video works such as Carlo Ansaldua's It's a Dictatorship, Eat (1983) and Martha Rosler's Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses provide a rigorous deconstruction of television advertising that demonstrates how bigotry, having been denied its historical targets (blacks and Jews), has returned with oblique, redoubled force to denigrate Latin Americans, Asians, women, children and animals. Guerrero's irony highlights the thin places in the wall of cultural relativity separating the so-called first and third worlds. The cracks in that barrier are becoming more pronounced all the time.

Robert Pincus, "The familiar becomes strange in paintings of Raul Guerrero," The San Diego Union Tribune, July 1987.

Raul Guerrero's paintings makes the vaguely familiar look strange. In one evocative canvas, ancient Zapotec figures look as if they're alive, huddling together in a shadowy enclosure. In another, a jaguar, pausing on a small rocky slope, seems as if he is about to study a mural of Mayan figures inscribed on the wall above him.

Guerrero has established himself as one of the most consistently engaging artists in San Diego. Born in California 42 years ago to parents who emigrated from Mexico, Guerrero spent much of the late '60s and '70s in Los Angeles. He made conceptually oriented art - installations involving props and sometimes sound.

After relocating here in 1980 Guerrero devoted much time to drawing. And after a long stay in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1984, he began to concentrate on painting, producing a series of pictures which lifted his work to a new level of accomplishment.

Subsequent works, as much wall constructions as paintings, make equally resonant use of the familiar. In "Shadows," the title alludes to the image rendered on the canvas: the shadow cast by an unseen stairway. Toy birds, attached to its surface, look as if they have come to life within the painted interior. "Durango," another strong work from 1986, is a landscape - picturing a road sign winding through steep cliffs, A fence-post-style frame makes "Durango" look like as much like a discarded saloon sign as a painting.

The approach in Guerrero's recent pictures harkens back to his Conceptualist work. They aren't expressions of emotional intensity so much as a set of stock symbols, cast in a slightly strange light to reinvest them with new life. They are akin to stills dredged up from the vast pool of images created by cinema.

Nor does Guerrero's work fit the Expressionist emphasis in the current survey of Hispanic art and perhaps this is why it wasn't included in "Hispanic Art in the United States." Whatever the reason it is a large loss to the exhibition.

Kristine McKenna, "Modern and Contemporary Art," Los Angeles Times, 1987.

"All my work is about the same idea: how to elicit a sub-conscious response to an image in an abstract form," explains Raul Guerrero. Part Surrealist/part sociologist, Guerrero made a name for himself in the '70s with conceptual work that explored the rituals and symbols of primitive cultures.

The fundamental building block of his work was and still is the vocabulary of popular cliche - a vernacular he uses because he believes the viewer is easily engaged when confronted with familiar imagery.

An exhibition of new works finds Guerrero still in search of the lost chord that connects Carl Jung's ideas to the stereotypical motifs of dreams, movies and the advertising industry. Residing in the netherworld where fact merges with fiction, Guerrero's work has the cinematic artificiality of Disneyland; everything here is slightly exaggerated and painted in eye-popping colors. His is a TV reality where artists always sport berets, ancient Egypt is reduced to a setting for a Bugs Bunny adventure, and the Old West is littered with "Wanted" posters, cow skulls and horseshoes.

Cloaking complex themes in a veil of kitsch is a slippery device that works for and against Guerrero. True, the viewer tends to let down his guard in the company of such debased imagery, but at the same time we reject cliches that exist as evidence of the commonality of human experience because they undermine our sense of individuality. A peculiar cloud of melancholy hangs about these goofy paintings - the melancholy of a schizophrenic culture that continues to need to believe in fairy tales as its innocence erodes at an increasingly alarming rate.

Kevin Allman, "La Vida Nocturna, Artist Raul Guerrero shows a different side of Tijuana in a series of paintings at the Saxon - Lee Gallery," Los Angeles Times, October 1989.

Tijuana - after dark. For many Americans who haven't been to this border town in years, the stereotypes remain: tourists buying serapes, shoddy hotels without running water, beggars on every corner, servicemen drunk in the streets.

"Tijuana is almost a magical word," said artist Raul Guerrero, whose new series of paintings, "Aspectos de la Vida Nocturna en Tijuana B.C.," is on display at the Saxon-Lee Gallery in Los Angeles through Nov.25. "But it brings with it a lot of preconceptions and stereotypes that are no longer true."

The truth, according to Guerrero, is that Tijuana is a playground for working-class Mexicans and has been since the 1930's, long before American tourists and shoppers left their mark on the city.

The San Diego-based artist drew inspiration for his vibrant canvases from "La Cahuilla," a downtown district of Tijuana that many Americans have never seen. It is a district where Mexicans eat, dance and listen to music - away from the tourists who shop, drink and dance in the American-style discotheques on the Avenida de La Revolucion, the city's main drag.

"I don't try to paint reality," said Guerrero, in Los Angeles for the opening of "Aspectos." "What I'm doing is capturing impressions, doing memory paintings...

"Even the artists who live in Tijuana haven't been dealing with the issue" of La Cahuilla. "By nature, this area has always been disdained as being the area of the working class, and the poor try to break out of it, because it's not what they want to be identified with."

To be sure, the paintings in "Aspectos" convey despair and tedium - but most of all, they glow with life. An October article in Vanity Fair said of the show, "What Toulouse-Lautrec did for the Moulin Rouge, Guerrero is doing for Mexico's border town...Guerrero's work is caliente."

Rendered in dynamic, near-Day-Glo tones of blue, red, yellow and orange, Guerrero's paintings juxtapose the exhilaration's of Tijuana's nightclub patrons with the passiveness and ennui of the musicians, bartenders, mariachis, B-girls and prostitutes who are there to serve.

In one large painting, four tired B-girls sit onstage at the Molino Rojo club, waiting for customers. At first, the women look much the same, bound by boredom and resignation, but a closer examination of the painting reveals the details that make each woman unique: the different curves of their bodies, their clothing, their body language.

In "Pickpocket," a man grabs a pretty woman who is simultaneously lifting his wallet from his jacket. And in a third painting, a man is face-down on a bar, his beer in front of him—an ambiguous image that could represent either sleep or despair.

Guerrero, 43, describes himself as "a third-generation American of Mexican ancestry." Born in Blythe, he first visited Tijuana in 1963 and has been back many times since. After graduating from the Chouinard Art School in 1970, he lived in Los Angeles for 10 years before settling in San Diego.

In a current long-term project, Guerrero is painting extended studies of three different locales from around the world, of which "Aspectos" is the second series. The first, "Reflections of the life and Times of a Venetian Jewess," was, in his words, "creating a fiction based on fact, based on the way that a Californian-Mexican-American educated on films might have thought and felt about daily life in Venice."

Sometime in the near future, Guerrero will be leaving to collect impressions for his third series: a set of paintings about day-to-day life in Iowa. He has yet to visit the state and selected the locale based on descriptions provided by a girlfriend who was born and raised in the Midwest.

He'll drive across Iowa for several weeks, making sketches and talking to local residents before returning to San Diego to begin painting.

"From the perspective of a Southern Californian, especially someone of my historical background, it's very alien." Guerrero said.

"But at the same time, it's a very important part of my cultural heritage. The Midwesterners came out here to live out their dream around the time of the war, and, in a way, their dream became my reality. In a way, it's like reverse colonialism."

Colonialism is also at work in Tijuana, according to Guerrero. Property and ownership laws have changed in Mexico, he said, allowing Americans to purchase homes and businesses there. The effects can already be seen on the streets of Tijuana on any Friday or Saturday night. Upscale Mexican restaurant/discos, not unlike the ones in Marina del Rey or Westwood, now line the Avenida de la Revolucion. American currency is accepted everywhere, and prices for meals and drinks are competitive with those in the United States. One new club, the Manhattan, is even presenting Mexican-flavored Vegas-style revues.

Faced with the encroachment of Americans who bring their way of life and entertainment into Tijuana, Guerrero says many native Mexicans are withdrawing farther and farther into the darkened areas of the city, trying to preserve their culture at old dance halls such as the Copacabana and the Guadalajara de Noche.

Guerrero thinks that change in Tijuana is inevitable, as the older bars, dance palaces and clubs give way to the far more profitable, and far more slick, American discotheques.

"I see, at most, another seven or eight years, before that old way of life is gone." Guerrero said quietly. "It's unfortunate, but the city is growing so quickly. Now that Americans can buy and own property there, that land is becoming so valuable. Look at what's left of the area around the Moulin Rouge in Paris.

"In a way, these paintings are like a little bit of history being captured."

Leah Ollman, "Artist's Stardom Didn't Come Out of Nowhere," Los Angeles Times, 1989.

He is modest, serious, private - not the kind of person you'd expect to see on the glossy pages of "Vanity Fair." But there he was last month , peeking out among the perfume ads and gossip, under the headline, "Hot Paints."

Now that the art world has become hopelessly star-struck, perhaps the magazine was a good place for local artist Raul Guerrero to be seen. His Los Angeles dealer thinks so. Guerrero, mildly allergic to marketing strategies and hype, just smiles.

"I'm a working-class artist," he said in a recent interview at his San Diego home and studio. "I'm in a situation where I need to make a living off my art, to continue my artistic quest."

That quest, begun in the late 1960's in Los Angeles, where he attended the legendary Chouinard Art School, has gradually but steadily assumed the characteristics of a successful career. Guerrero's third one-person show at Los Angeles' Saxon-Lee Gallery opened last month and continues through Nov. 25. He is one of 13 artists - and the only one living outside of the L. A. area - featured in the inaugural exhibit at Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts (through Jan. 31).

The current issue of the art quarterly, "Visions" carries a statement by Guerrero in its special section on multiculturalism and the arts. And next year, a fountain designed by the artist will be unveiled as part of the Hope Street redevelopment project commissioned by the city of Los Angeles. Other participants include architect Frank Gehry and artist David Hockney.

Guerrero's work is, indeed "caliente," as Karen Smith exclaims in "Vanity Fair." But the artist, 44, is no overnight sensation. He has had nearly 20 solo exhibitions in San Diego, Los Angeles and elsewhere since his first show in 1974 and a healthy dose of attention from the press as well. One critic dismissed the inverted pyramid, flying saucer hubcaps, rotating Indian mask and other symbolic constructions in his first show as "irritatingly hip." Others since have labeled his photographs, paintings and constructions mysterious, disturbing, vital, intriguing, timeless, gentle, ironic and haunting.

Despite the extreme permutations in style that his work has shown, varying from sever conceptualism to lyrical romanticism, Guerrero said he has been following the same line of thought for the last 15 years. He's searching he said, for a poetic reality that exists between an object or situation and the person perceiving it.

"To illustrate reality is, in itself, not significant enough to achieve a level of poetics," he said. "There's a moment when you enter that realm, a transitory zone between fiction, what you imagine and what you perceive based on your entire contextual history, your background, education, what conditions you to see."

Guerrero's interest in reconciling reality and fiction surfaces in perhaps its most accessible form in his paintings of the last few years. The suite, "Reflections on the life and Times of a Venetian Jewess, " conveys Guerrero's impressions of the textures, light and color of the Italian city as much as it restates certain cliches about the place stemming from "what Hollywood fed me, what I read in books." The melange of expectations he brings to a place, he said are as tangible as the direct sensations experienced there.

The Venetian series launched a trilogy, whose second part is the current series, "Aspectos de la Vida Nocturna en Tijuana B.C. (Aspects of the Night Life in Tijuana B.C.)" Each of these environments required a different attitude, he said.

" I set out to do places that were exotic, romantic, that offered the possibility of color, places that were a celebration of life, places that I had an affinity for."

Venice, he said, is "part of our collective knowledge as one of the grand cities of the world," while the bars and clubs of Tijuana summon more personal memories. Painting this series "was part of re-experiencing what I had done as a teenager, as a rite of passage, to go down to the Blue Fox."

Guerrero still sees work ahead for the Tijuana series, which was shown locally at the David Zapf Gallery and is now on view at Saxon-Lee in Los Angeles, but his third destination is already set: Iowa.

"It's part of my cultural heritage, since I was brought up in the U.S. It affected my psyche, because many of the dreams lived out in Southern California originated in the Midwest."

Though he has never been there, he expects his visit will be like "going back and delving into the historical side of myself."

Each of the locales Guerrero chooses poses a different structural problem, he said, and each calls for a different solution. An earlier series based on a stay in Mexico related to the " magic realism" of such Latin American authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez in its combination of the imaginary and the concrete.

Fundamental to all of his work, however, is a curiosity about symbols, myths and the cultural archetypes that strike deep in the viewer's unconscious. His passionate pursuit of these essential symbols led artist Ed Rusha, who collects Guerrero's work, to believe that " he has some demons haunting him and he lets them out his work."

Guerrero chuckled at the thought, then quickly sifted the comments for insights.

"I had never thought about it like that, and I think he's right. But I think he missed the angels hovering around me. I thing what he meant was that I'm obsessed by it. I'm totally captivated by the creative act, the creative pursuit. I think about it all the time.